April 6, 2026: More rot, more longing to disappear.

April 6, 2026, Around 2 or 3AM.

Sorry. Forgive me but I am not done with my rant of last night, so before the week starts, let me hold onto the leftover Sunday night and finish taking this dump of rot that is continued. Some days, the need to be elsewhere does not feel like longing. It feels like a reflex. A flinch of the soul. As if my inner life has spent so long bracing against this one that it now mistakes disappearance for design. I do not just want to leave this room, this city, this version of myself. I want to leave the sequence entirely. I want another arrangement of cause and consequence. Another childhood. Another girlhood. Another body that did not learn vigilance so early. Another adulthood not built like a delayed apology. Another womanhood that is not so distraught and misused. Another family. Another identity. Another school. Another college. Another dream. Another passion. Another sadness. Another personhood. Or, another hood altogether.

Because, the lives I did not live somewhere else as someone else will forever haunt me. Because, I have spent too much of my life rehearsing departure in places I never left. Because, the urge to be someone else has made my brain hold me captive in a horror house. And I know how dramatic that sounds (horror house) but I mean it quite literally in the emotional, mental, and psychological sense.

Every corridor in it leads to a version of me that did not happen. A girl in better clothes. A girl in a different city. A girl with a room of her own and no one else's moods clinging to the curtains, no one else's permissions hanging in the clothes, no one else's footsteps entering the bloodstream before they even reached the door. A girl who said yes when I said no and no when I said yes. A girl who moved through life with more instinct than hesitation. A girl who studied what she wanted, loved what she wanted, left when she should have, stayed when it mattered, and somehow did not end up here; half-fermented in her own life, writing from the stale middle of it, with her wants lined up like abandoned vessels. A girl who was not always standing three selves away from herself, observing, editing, withholding. And I suppose this is the first humiliation of it: that the self I wanted was never particularly grand. Not extraordinary. Not famous. Not dazzling. Just inhabitable. Just someone I could have lived inside without flinching.

Maybe that is why the fantasy has such staying power. If I had only dreamed of impossible things, perhaps I could dismiss them as vanity, delusion, ego in costume. But the lives I did not live are made of such ordinary materials that their loss feels almost embarrassing to grieve. The right coat. The right train ticket. A degree pursued with conviction instead of panic. A rented room with thin curtains and a kettle. A city where I would have become anonymous enough to begin. A body less watched, less interpreted, less managed. A life with enough breath in it for appetite. It is so mundane, really, the architecture of my elsewhere. Which is perhaps why it hurts. I am not mourning fantasy in its most flamboyant form. I am mourning accessibility. Ease. A version of adulthood that did not already feel spoiled before opening.

And yes, I am aware there is a material vulgarity to this longing too. It is never only the grand things, never only destiny with a capital D. It is material too. Embarrassingly material. It is never just spiritual or psychological. It comes draped in things. It comes with objects attached, because objects are often the nearest visible edges of unlived selves.The unlived life has texture. It has the clothes I wished to wear without feeling watched by the walls or without having to grow a different spine first. It has foods I wanted to try without calculating cost, guilt, digestion, consequence or foods I wanted to eat in places and times where they would not feel like an occasion I had to justify. It has train rides and airport benches and secondhand bookshops in streets whose names I do not know. It has notebooks bought in optimism. Books I wanted to buy and annotate in cafes I wanted to linger in. Shoes with a particular kind of heel-click that would announce not fear but arrival. It has lipstick shades that belonged to a braver mouth. It has rings, boots, perfumes, cities, libraries, bowls of pasta eaten alone but without sadness, mornings that began in peace instead of retrieval. Even my fantasies arrive furnished. Yes. My fantasies are embarrassingly furnished. They come with shelves and lamps and train stations and tote bags and second-hand bookshops and the private eroticism of being able to spend money on a self I actually believed would continue. That last part matters. It is not greed. It is continuity. People buy things for futures they assume they are allowed to have. My problem, perhaps, is that I have too often treated the future as a rumour. Even my longing knows the price tags of the things that would have made me feel more inhabitably human.

And then there is the more difficult question, the one that resists being romanticized: what stopped me? I want to be careful here because there is always a temptation to either externalize everything and become pure victim, or internalize everything and become my own little tyrant. The truth, disgustingly, is always mixed. What stopped me is not one thing, which is perhaps the cruelest part. I could forgive a single villain. I could build an altar to one clean disaster. But it was never one thing. It was a long conspiracy.

What stopped me was money, yes. Family, yes. Illness, yes. Anxiety, depression, timing, cowardice, obedience, class, gender, shame, exhaustion, bad luck, internal fracture, abuse, trauma, a body and brain that do not carry life lightly, an economy that makes even the most modest independence feel like an elaborate joke, that old rot that teaches you to doubt your own hunger the moment it begins to speak, yes, yes, yes. But what also stopped me was how thoroughly I had already been trained into hesitation. How instinctively I mistrusted my own appetite. How often I mistook fear for prudence and self-erasure for maturity. How much of my life was built not around desire but around impact reduction: how to want less, take less, ask less, be less difficult to carry. One does not become that way overnight. It is a long schooling. And its cruelest lesson is that after enough years, you begin to mistake your shrinking for personality. It was my body. It was my mind. It was the thousand tiny humiliations that gather around a life and slowly train it to expect less. It was the way survival makes cowards of us, and then punishes us for cowardice. It was that I kept waiting to become someone who could begin, while life kept happening to the person who hadn’t.

Which is why I recoil slightly when people talk about self-actualization as if it is simply a matter of courage. Courage, my foot. Courage is expensive. It requires a floor to fall from and some faith that the fall will not end you. Some of us have spent too long learning that one wrong move can cost more than revelation is worth. Some of us become archivists of our own restraint. We collect abandoned versions of ourselves not because we are whimsical, but because consequences have always arrived to us dressed more convincingly than freedom ever did. This is not an excuse. It is worse than an excuse. It is an anatomy.

And still. Still. And, this is the part that irritates me, the part that refuses to die cleanly. Despite all of that, something survives of the wanting. This is what irritates me most. I say survives because it does not flourish. It does not stride about with confidence. It survives like mold in corners, like a plant with one stubborn green vein left, like an ember under wet ash. It survives in ridiculous places: in bookmarked courses, in dresses saved to folders, in tabs left open for cities I may never touch, in the way I still note apartments as if there were a version of me preparing to move, in the way a single good sentence can make me briefly believe that another arrangement of self and life is not entirely impossible. That after all this thinning out, all this disappointment, all this reluctant familiarity with the limits of things, some stubborn little ember still hisses when I see a photograph of elsewhere, when I read about a woman who remade herself, when I buy a notebook as if I have not already failed fifty others, when I write a sentence that sounds briefly like escape. Some idiotic, unkillable shard of me still believes there is another arrangement possible. Not ideal. Not cinematic. Just less airless. Less belittled. Less trapped inside the architecture of old damage. This surviving want is not noble. It is inconvenient. It ruins despair by refusing to become total.

Maybe that is what haunts me most. Not the lives I did not live, but the fact that I can still imagine them. If the wanting had died completely, perhaps I would at least have the dignity of finality. But no. It hangs on like mould in monsoon corners, like a smell in fabric, like the memory of a key to a house that no longer exists. It survives in ridiculous forms. In bookmarked courses. In saved dresses. In tabs left open. In the way I still mentally arrange future rooms I may never enter. In the way a part of me is always packing, even while the rest of me has long since unpacked into defeat.

And perhaps that is what I really cannot settle with: that after all this time, all this fatigue, all this erosion, some part of me still behaves as if it has not received the final memo. Some part of me still thinks in alternatives. Still leans toward elsewhere as if the word itself contains oxygen. Still constructs tiny passageways out of language, objects, fantasy, style, work, art, movement. Still wants not in the vague ornamental sense, but in the bodily sense. Wants like a muscle. Wants like a pulse. Which should be heartening, I know. Except it isn't always. Sometimes it only sharpens the tragedy. Desire is not always a life force; sometimes it is evidence. Evidence of what has not been met. Evidence of what has been deferred so long it has started to go sour.

So I keep asking myself whether elsewhere is still a place, or whether it has become a symptom. Whether I truly long for another geography, or whether my mind has simply become addicted to the fantasy of displacement because it cannot bear the intimacy of this life. Maybe elsewhere is not a city, not a country, not even another body. Maybe it is just the shape my dissatisfaction takes when it grows too large to sit inside me quietly. Maybe it is grief in travel clothes. Maybe it is depression with a passport. Maybe it is what longing becomes when it has nowhere practical to go. This is the kind of question I can spend hours chewing on because both answers feel unbearable. If elsewhere is a place, then I have failed to get there. If it is a symptom, then perhaps I have been treating an inner condition as a geographical one all along. Perhaps what I call longing is sometimes only displacement instinct, the mind trying to escape itself through scenery. Perhaps I have mistaken the fantasy of movement for transformation. Perhaps no city can save a person from the architecture of her own dread. But then, that too can become a trap, can’t it? The over-psychologising of every wish until desire itself becomes suspect. Until every wanting is treated as pathology. Until the simple, sane human wish for another life gets diagnosed into submission.

And I am tired of doing that too, of turning every hunger into a case study, every ache into a theory, every small surviving impulse toward beauty or distance into something I must interrogate before I am allowed to feel it. Sometimes I think the mind's cleverness is one of its cruelest weapons. It takes a straightforward grief. My life did not become what I hoped. And forces it into a thousand chambers of analysis until even pain becomes hard to hold plainly. Still, plainness eludes me. I can't just say I wanted more. I have to ask what "more" means, for whom, against what conditions, and whether the wanting was mine or manufactured or
inherited or defensive or late. This is what I mean by captivity. It is not only that I am trapped in a life. I am trapped in interpretation.

But then again, maybe I think that only because I have been denied elsewhere for so long that I have started to pathologize the desire for it. Maybe wanting out is not sickness. Maybe it is the last sane reflex left in a life that has asked too often to be endured rather than inhabited. Maybe the rehearsals of departure were not delusion, but instinct. Maybe there was always something in me trying, in its own frantic and failing way, to save my life from becoming only this. But perhaps that too is because interpretation has been one of the only tools available to me. When one cannot move freely through the world, one overdevelops motion within the mind. One becomes a digger, a circler, a ruminator, a chronic reviser of inner terrain. One learns to survive by reading every tremor for meaning. And yes, this can become grotesque. Exhausting. Disgusting, even. A kind of word-and-mind-diarrhea, if I am being honest. But it is also how I have kept myself company. How I have refused the bluntness of numbness. How I have made a record, however excessive, of what it felt like to be here while wanting elsewhere with such embarrassing persistence.

So maybe elsewhere is both place and symptom. Maybe it is a real hunger and an interpretive wound. Maybe it is the name I give to the version of life in which my wants do not have to arrive disguised as theory. Maybe it is not another city at all, but a self I could enter without all this recoil. Maybe it is a room of my own. Maybe it is enough money to breathe. Maybe it is a body less full of alarms. Maybe it is simply the absence of being constantly, grindingly over-acquainted with diminishment.

I do not know. I only know that there is a version of me always pressing her palm to the glass of another life. Not glamorous. Not impossible. Just other. Just less cramped by the old damage. Less bruised by repetition. Less known by dread. Less watched by dread. Less delayed. Less fluent in internal evacuation. Less trained in diminishment. And I do not know whether she is a mirage, a memory from the future, or simply the shape of my refusal. I only know that she has followed me for years, and that some nights (nights like this one and the last one) she feels less like fantasy and more like accusation, but also witness. As if she has been standing there all this time, on the other side of the glass, asking not why I failed to become her, but why I was made to believe that wanting her was indulgence in the first place.

And maybe that is where the rot really is. Not only in the unlived life, but in the long conditioning that taught me to meet my own desires first with suspicion, then with embarrassment, then with elegy. As if longing itself needed to be housebroken. As if escape were vulgar. As if survival should have been enough to keep me from grieving the texture of the life I never got to touch.

No false dawn. No brave little sunrise crawling over the hill with a lesson tucked under its arm.

So what now? That ugly, practical question. The one that always comes shambling in after the mind has finished staging its little apocalypse. What now, after all this analysis, all this excavation, all this circling of the unlived life like a dog around the place it means to die? What does one do with an elsewhere that has outlived its usefulness as fantasy but refuses to harden into fact?

Nothing noble, I suspect. Nothing cinematic. I will not emerge from this entry clarified. I will not suddenly book a ticket, reinvent myself, become decisive, become brave, become one of those women who finally chooses herself with clean hands and a steady gaze. I know myself too well for that kind of masturbatory ending. More likely, I will wake up in the same room, in the same body, under the same old economies of dread, and continue the long, undignified labour of being a person I did not entirely consent to becoming.

And maybe that is part of the obscenity of it all. That life does not pause respectfully when one is psychologically elsewhere. The dishes still exist. The inbox still multiplies. The body still demands medicine, food, water, maintenance. Work still waits with its little bureaucratic appetite. The world keeps asking for behaviour from a person who has privately gone missing. That, too, is a kind of violence, I think. Not dramatic enough to be named as such, but constant enough to leave marks. The expectation of functioning after the soul has spent the night trying to tunnel out through the teeth.

Sometimes I think writing is only another rehearsal of departure. Not escape exactly, because I am still here while writing, unfortunately, still pinned to the same coordinates. But it is a way of splitting, of sending some thinking part of myself ahead into a space the rest of me cannot yet inhabit. A scout, perhaps. A fugitive organ. A mouth going where the body cannot follow. Which is why it exhausts me and why I return to it anyway. Because if I cannot leave, I can at least produce evidence that leaving was once imagined with enough force to feel almost anatomical.

And no, that does not save me. Let me be clear. I am not trying to smuggle redemption in through the back door under the respectable name of Art. Writing does not heal the thing in any full or serious sense. It records. It stains. It enlarges. It sometimes makes the interior look even more uninhabitable by turning on all the lights at once. But at least then the horror house stops pretending to be a home. At least then the rot is named before it can pass itself off as personality. At least then I have not colluded entirely in my own disappearance.

Perhaps that is the closest I can come tonight to an answer, if answer is even the word. Elsewhere still grips me. The unlived lives still rattle around in their little display cases, accusingly intact. The wanting survives, which is inconvenient. The analysis survives, which is worse. I survive too, somehow, though not in any way that would make for an inspirational poster. More like mildew survives. More like rust. More like a bad habit of consciousness that has not yet found the courtesy to extinguish itself.

And still, even now, I can feel the mind trying to set up another exit. Another imagined room. Another future in disguise. It is embarrassing, this persistence. Almost vulgar. But perhaps vulgarity is all that remains when dignity has been thinned out by too much self-awareness. Perhaps there is nothing left to do but admit that I am still full of unsanctioned wants, still stalked by alternate selves, still made ridiculous by the ongoing suspicion that life might have been otherwise and that I was not wrong to want that otherwise with such appetite.

So let this stand, then, not as resolution, but as residue. Not as a lesson. Not as a neat little emotional compost heap from which something nourishing will surely grow. I am tired of forcing usefulness onto suffering just to justify its space. Let it be ugly. Let it be excessive. Let it be one more entry in the long archive of a person trying, with mixed results and worsening posture, to understand why being here has so often felt like being kept from herself.

And tomorrow; hateful, repetitive, unimpressed tomorrow; will come anyway. Not because I invited it. Not because I am ready. Not because the page has ended on a note of maturity. It will simply arrive, as all brute facts do, and I will have to meet it with whatever is left of me after this. Which may not be much. Which may only be language. Which may only be this: I am still here, and I am still unconvinced.

~ Oizys.